BRANDON: Hey! Welcome to the
SanderFAQ. This is me doing frequently asked questions. And one I get a
lot is, “Where should I start with your books?” Well, this is not an easy question to answer
because I like to tailor the book to the individual. When I’m in person pitching my books
to people, I talk to them and kind of see what they’re in the mood for and what they’ve liked in
the past by other authors and things like that. And I generally try to target them at the
book I think they will enjoy the most. As a writer I like to write a lot of
different things, and part of that is to just keep myself excited about the
process. One of the things I do is I often, once I finish a book, like I just wrapped up
Rhythm of War, the fourth Stormlight book, is I look for something very different to do right
after, which in this case is going to be the third Skyward book, just so that I can refresh myself
and be doing something different. Because of that, I have a lot of variety to the types of stories
I tell, though they all tend to be some form of weird science fiction or fantasy. So, I’m going to
give you a couple of pitches as places to start. The most obvious place to start is at the
beginning with Elantris. This is a pretty decent place to start because Elantris is a stand-alone
novel. I like that we have some stand-alone epic fantasies in the Cosmere that are places you can
begin, that you’re not starting something huge, that you’re just starting a single book and you
can see if you like my style. The argument against Elantris is it is my first novel. It’s actually
my sixth novel. I wrote 13 before I sold one. That means Mistborn, which is my second published
novel, is actually my 14th written, and I grew a ton in between Elantris and Mistborn. And I
think I grew an equal amount between Mistborn and eventually writing Stormlight, The Way of Kings,
because the whole Wheel of Time thing was in there. See a previous FAQ entry to find out more
about that. But Elantris, a good place to start as long as you know you’re seeing little baby Brandon
and his infant steps as a professional writer. The next most obvious place to start is Mistborn,
and this is where I recommend most people begin. Mistborn is a great step up in my
writing experience over Elantris. Not as good as I would get in the Stormlight
Archive, I feel, but still pretty good. And it does all the things that I do. It just does
a little bit of everything. It has a little bit of romance, a little bit of humor, a lot of
action adventure, some interesting worldbuilding. Mistborn, if you haven’t read it, it is a
mashup between two ideas. I wanted to write a book. I love epic fantasy. I’ve been reading
it for a while, since basically my whole life. I was thinking, I was reading a Harry Potter
book, and I thought, “Man, these dark lords never get a break.” They always get defeated by
some doofus kid, or furry footed British person. They’re these powerful overlords and then
someone throws their ring in a hole, and they’re dead. I thought, “What if the dark
lord won?” What if Frodo got to the end of Lord of the Rings and Sauron’s like, “Oh, my
ring, I’ve been looking for that. Thanks for bringing it all that way. That must have been
really hard.” Or at the end of Harry Potter, Voldemort had just been like, “Um, yeah, you’re
a dumb kid and I’m a super powerful wizard, so you’re dead and I rule the world.” I
thought that would be a bit of a downer as a book series. I filed that in the back of
my head. But I thought, someday I want to write a series about a world where the hero failed.
Another one of my loves are heist stories. I love a good heist. Inception is one of my favorite
modern films, and among the classics I love The Sting, and Sneakers is one of my all-time favorite
movies. I love a good story about a team that gets together to accomplish some near-impossible
task by breaking it down to their different specialties and then using their individual
specialties to pull off something awesome. Well, I put these two stories together. It
became Mistborn. It’s a story where the hero failed and a thousand years later gang of
thieves are going to rob him. They want to pull a heist on the dark lord. They’re going
to try to do some good things for the empire by using that money to bribe his armies away and
maybe start a revolution or things. But it starts as a heist. It’s about a young woman who gets
recruited into their team as they realize they need a new member of their team because there’s a
certain job they can’t do because they’re all just two well known by now. They’re all kind of famous
thieves. And so, the story is told through the eyes of a young girl, a teenage girl I should say,
who is recruited, taught to use the magic. And so, it’s really a cross between Oceans 11 and My Fair
Lady, happening in a world where the Dark Lord won. That’s Mistborn, a great place to start.
But my best book is probably The Way of Kings, my best series. It’s the series where I’ve grown
the most and it is my big epic. But Mistborn, even though it’s a trilogy, you can read the first
one. The first one is written as a stand-alone. The first Stormlight book is not written as a
stand-alone. It’s called The Way of Kings. And it is 1,000 pages long. It is the most different
of the worlds I’m writing in, and it is taking on a lot. I often recommend people start something
else so they know I can finish before they jump into the series that isn’t done yet. That said,
if your love is the immersive fantasy epic, The Way of Kings is an immersive fantasy epic.
It is a story primarily of a young man who is recruited for war, but he was trained as a
surgeon. And he learns he’s really good at killing people. And it’s that balance he walks as a youth
as a surgeon who decides he wants to be a soldier. He goes into a really terrible situation.
And it’s about also the brother of the king after the king gets assassinated, happens
in the prologue so not much of a spoiler, who really would probably be a good king,
but his nephew takes over and he’s not sure his nephew’s a good king. It’s kind of like his
interactions as he starts to look back at his life of bloodshed as a warlord and trying to really
think about kingship and leadership and what he’s accomplished in his life, if anything, because
his whole country is full of squabbling people and his conquering days didn’t really accomplish
that much. And he starts to have visions that his son thinks is him going insane and he thinks
might be something leading to the restoration of an ancient order of knights. So, he’s not sure if
he’s crazy, and it is just a really awesome epic that I have a lot of trouble encapsulating.
Like, Mistborn I can pitch at you really easily. Hero failed. Dark Lord took over. Heist to rob
him. Stormlight I have no idea how to pitch. Even still, it’s been out for 10 years now, no idea how
to pitch it. But if you trust me and you want some expansive worldbuilding and deep characters
and lore, Way of Kings is the place to start. But it’s not the only option you have. Those three
aren’t your only options. You could start with Warbreaker, another stand-alone epic, written
during kind of the more modern age of Brandon writing, so I’m a little better of a writer,
focused a little bit more on romance and comedy. You could start with one of my YA books. Skyward
is where I would point you there, which is about, it’s a science fiction. It is shorter than my
other books. It’s 100,000 words instead of 200,000 to 400,000 in Stormlight’s case. It’s normal book
sized, I should say. About a young woman who wants to be a fighter pilot in a far future science
fiction environment. She wants to be a star fighter pilot and she finds a broken down ship,
which has a very strange AI, which she thinks she might be able to convince to turn into her ship.
You could read Steelheart, which is my other YA series, which is what if people started getting
superpowers in our world, but only evil people got them. It’s about a group of assassins
without powers who assassinate supervillains. Or you could read my award winner, which is The
Emperor’s Soul, a novella that won the Hugo Award, which is a kind of introspective piece
about the nature of art and philosophy, also set in a fantasy world, in the same world
as Elantris, with all of these things. Not the YA books, but the other ones are all connected in
my large-scale universe that’s called the Cosmere. There are lots of places to start, and if you
want just pure silliness, you could read my middle grade series, Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians,
which is just goofy and fun and insane. I write a lot of different things. I didn’t
even mention Legion, which is a series of three novellas that I kind of made as a pitch for
a quirky detective show about someone who has hallucinations of different individuals, but they
help him instead of hurting him. He basically turns that into his superpower and solves crimes.
I do all kinds of very different and strange things. Hopefully one of those many things appeals
to you and you’ll give them a try. I’m sure Adam, my intrepid marketing director will link them all
in the description. Thank you, guys, for watching.
